Sen. Roger Marshall: US Must Stop Funding Dangerous Research With Communist China

[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] In this episode, I sit down with Sen. Dr. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), an obstetrician and gynecologist, to get his take on gain of function research, the origins of the virus, and Dr. Anthony Fauci’s recent testimony before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

Dr. Marshall shares what he believes are the “smoking guns” that link the origins of the coronavirus to a lab leak in Wuhan, China.

“If we’re funding this type of research in a place like Wuhan, China, where we know that the CCP military is working hand in glove with all those scientists, I mean … this whole thing is a national security issue,” says Dr. Marshall. He argues all grants moving forward must be assessed for national security risks.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Senator Roger Marshall, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Senator Roger Marshall:
Jan, we’re going to have a great discussion today. I’ve been looking forward to this for weeks.

Mr. Jekielek:
Absolutely. I just left the hearing where Dr. Anthony Fauci was testifying about Covid origins. What is your reaction?

Senator Marshall:
Jan, somebody is lying here. It’s either Dr. Fauci or Dr. Morens. First of all, Fauci says that the United States was not funding gain-of-function research, when the NIH and State Department experts in the field all said we were funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China. Fauci still can’t look the camera in the eye and admit to that. Then he says that Morens is lying and that he did not participate in any of these cover-ups. Fauci is very clearly trying to distance himself from Dr. Morens’ testimony, even though he was his main assistant for 20 years. Somebody out there is lying.

Mr. Jekielek:
You wrote an op-ed which we just ran in the Epoch Times. You assert that he must have known about bioweapons development in China. He was asked, “Were you ever briefed by the U.S. State Department in 2005 and warned that the Chinese government was working on the creation of bioweapons? He said, “I was not aware of that.” He was also asked, “Did you ever discuss the Chinese bioweapons program with anyone in the intelligence community?” He said, “I never discussed the Chinese bioweapons program, to my knowledge, with anybody.”

Senator Marshall:
It is his responsibility to know, and if he doesn’t, then shame on him. He has two roles right now that he’s being paid for. He’s being paid as the chief medical officer advisor, head of the NIAID [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] for the president. Additionally, he’s the chief civilian biodefense person for the civilian world, and he’s getting paid a salary to do that. How could he not know? What Russia and China were doing from a biosecurity offensive weapon standpoint has been well-sourced knowledge since at least the 1990s. I don’t know how anybody at his level in the government wouldn’t know this. If he doesn’t, then shame on him.

Mr. Jekielek:
What do you make of the questioning during the hearing ?

Senator Marshall:
We need to be focusing on the processes that he didn’t follow through on and the processes that are absolutely missing. Beyond Dr. Fauci, we need to be talking about what we need to do as a government with this gain-of-function research. Gain-of-function research is code for bioweapons research. It really is the same thing. These are not two different issues.

We need to focus on why national security isn’t part of the decision-making process when we’re doing these grants? Why are we funding gain-of-function research with our adversaries? Why are we letting scientists from these countries of concern into our laboratories as well? Imagine if I said, “We just sent our best nuclear scientists to Iran and North Korea and their scientists are in our labs as well.”

But for some reason with this gain-of-function research, people can’t make the visual. They don’t understand that even though there’s not a bomb going off, gain-of-function research has resulted in maybe a thousand times more deaths than nuclear bombs. We need to put it in this perspective. Where is the national security on this?

It’s very clear that we’re funding this type of research in a place like Wuhan, China, where we know that the CCP military is working hand in glove with all those scientists. The CCP labs are making the fentanyl precursors that come over here. It’s not like in America where you have Kansas State’s research laboratory over here, and then Fort Detrick’s research laboratory over here. They’re all in the same place. We need to bring this national security aspect into all these grants that we’re funding.

Mr. Jekielek:
You said that bioweapons research has resulted in a thousand times more deaths than nuclear bombs. Please explain that to us.

Senator Marshall:
I believe that Covid-19 is the result of gain-of-function research and has the potential to be a biosecurity weapon. Why are they making a virus that sticks to human lung cells like glue? It’s very specifically designed. That’s just horrific.

They might say, “We were going to make a vaccine for it.” But I just don’t see why you’d be making this particular virus, which doesn’t even occur in nature, for the purpose of making a vaccine out of it. I can’t make that connection. That’s the problem with gain-of-function research.

We need to outlaw anything that’s being made for a bad purpose. It’s crazy what Fauci said in his comments today. He said, “If you expand the gain-of-function definition, we couldn’t do research on a flu vaccine.” What a horrible lie to tell the American public. That’s not true at all.

Mr. Jekielek:
They would say that this is all about preparing for future pandemics. There is a doctrine of military-civil fusion in China. Civilians are required to cooperate with the military on anything that has a military potential. It’s a known fact that the Chinese military was working in the Wuhan lab. Fauci would say, “Because we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, we’re going to go in the lab and tweak things to make them highly infectious to humans, so we can then create countermeasures. That way we are protecting against random mutations. We are protecting against the spread of this potential virus. We are figuring out how we can deal with these potential bioweapons.” Then they would say, “There’s nothing wrong with this.”

Senator Marshall:
Yes. As a physician, I would say they’re balancing the benefit to the risk. For 30 years they have been saying, “If you allow us to do this gain-of-function research, we’ll develop a vaccine that’s going to save the Earth. So far, there have been no results for 30 years. But for decades we’ve had multiple lab leaks from gain-of-function research, even here in the United States.

That’s why the Obama administration shut down gain-of-function research. It was because of our own lab leaks. But somehow, Fauci has always found a way around it. I understand the potential gain, but until you put the proper guardrails around it, the downside is just too horrible right now. Again, why would we be over there teaching them how to do this?

Let’s back up. R. Ralph Baric in North Carolina taught Dr. Shi how to make the protein spike. He then gave her the humanized mice that could have the ACE2 receptors as well. He taught them how to do this. Now, I once trusted Ralph Baric, a good professor and scientist from North Carolina. But we’re sleeping with the enemy right now. I don’t trust him.

I remember President Reagan said, “Trust, but verify.” This doesn’t just apply to nuclear weapons. This whole thing is a national security issue. We have to trust but verify. EcoHealth was just a funneling mechanism for money. We gave EcoHealth $150 million for some 20 years preceding Covid, and they were funneling it in different directions.

But they had no idea what they were doing there and that’s breaking the law too. The grant requirements say that you have to have proper control of what’s going on. Here’s the question they should have been asking Dr. Fauci today, “Dr. Fauci, did USAID [U. S. Agency for International Development] have anybody there in Wuhan participating in and supervising this? “ The answer is, No, nobody, nothing.” Even after this epidemic exploded, we can’t get researchers in there to do any research. They won’t give us the DNA virus. We should ask, “Dr. Fauci, what was the upside of doing research with Wuhan, China right now?” There was no upside to this.

Mr. Jekielek:
In 2020, you were already asking questions and very passionate about this issue. What were you thinking back in 2020?

Senator Marshall:
That’s a great question. It seems like a long time ago, but actually it was just yesterday. I read two or three hours every day and I’m very intellectually curious. In the first week of January, I read about this novel virus in China. I’m a physician and thinking about SARS and MERS and Ebola.

SARS had been in China and what did China do at that time? They obfuscated from the very beginning. They underestimated it and didn’t share with anybody where it came from or what was going on. I said, “I’m not just responsible for my patients anymore. I’m a congressman from Kansas and I’m running for the U. S. Senate. I have a big responsibility and I better look into this.”

I began researching what is in Wuhan, China. There is a BSL-4 [biosafety lab level four] laboratory in Wuhan, China. What were the chances of that? Then you could just tell that China was hiding something. What were they hiding? Why wouldn’t they just give us the DNA sequence?

There were different doctors reaching out to me saying, “Something’s up. We can’t get any information out of China.” Then all of a sudden China was saying, “There’s no human-to-human transmission.” By the end of January, there were people in Thailand, Japan, and Taiwan with this virus. But supposedly, there was no human to human transmission. That made no sense to me as well.

There was an article in the Wall Street Journal that said, “Don’t worry. We have CDC scientists in Wuhan looking into this.” I get the CDC on the phone and say, “What are you guys finding?” They say, “Well, we’ve got scientists in China, but they’re not in Wuhan. They won’t let us within a thousand miles of it.” They lied. They said that they had scientists in China, but that’s like reviewing a hurricane in Florida and sending your scientists to Washington State.

It all just never added up to me. Jan, you’ve done stories like this. You keep hitting a dead end, but every time you forge ahead you find something new. You find four more open doors that you need to open. I’m still on this search. Every time I peel back a layer of this onion, there’s more there. It just never ends.

Mr. Jekielek:
We published a documentary in April of 2020 to put together what we already knew. What was the more likely scenario? That was the question that we were asking, given all the information that was available at that point. We did have the sequence at that point.

There was this suspicious furin cleavage site that you don’t find in such viruses which is typically used to facilitate human transmission. We put it all together in a basic way and it has aged well. But what have we discovered since that time? What do we know now? Please outline the most important facts for us .

Senator Marshall:
I was making my timelines and my theories back in April of 2020 as well. People can go to marshall.senate.gov and see a 15-minute video we did on the timeline several years ago. I talk through what I call the smoking guns. It was a great time to talk about that. Things that we were postulating then, we’ve now proven and we’ve added more pieces to it.

There were about seven or eight smoking guns that would show that this virus was made by a laboratory in Wuhan and leaked from there as well. I don’t think it was released on purpose. Not even the CCP would do that. We already mentioned the geography. What are the chances of this virus showing up next to a BSL-4 laboratory?

In April 2020, we were wondering about an intermediate species, and it was only four months into it. But here we are four years later and there’s still no intermediate species. Let me remind your listeners that SARS happened in 2002 and it took them four or five months to find the civet cat that was the intermediate species. The virus went from the bats to the civet cat and then to humans. In the MERS epidemic of 2012, it was the camel, but we still don’t have the intermediate host.

The next smoking gun is the progenitor issue. China could have easily shown some type of progenitor; the father, the grandfather, or the great uncle of this virus as it emerged from a bat into humans. They should have known the intermediate host and they should have found all these sequences.

Dr. Shi, known as bat woman, took down her viral DNA laboratory in September of 2019, which is why I believe there were actually two leaks from the laboratory, the first one being in September of 2019. Then she destroyed all these virus samples, the eight viruses that were probably closest to the backbone of Covid-19. Now, we also found out that they were not the same.

They were doing research on a vaccine in November of 2019. We probably didn’t know that in April of 2020 and I did not figure that out until later. Since then, a number of people that knew something about this have mysteriously died. They jailed journalists, physicians, and scientists. Certainly some had very suspicious ends to their lives as well. There are all these little pieces to the puzzle.

I want to talk about the DNA sequence of this virus. We mentioned the protein spike, which is very unique to this project. You mentioned the furin cleavage site, which does not naturally occur in this type of virus. Lastly, and no one’s talking about this, but there’s a sequence upstream from the furin cleavage site. called QTQTN, and that is what shuts down your immune system. We didn’t know that then. We didn’t know how this virus worked.

Those are the smoking guns. I would add that we also didn’t know about the DEFUSE lab application to the DoD. This DEFUSE grant application from EcoHealth basically requested money to do what ends up being the Covid-19 project. What are the chances of that?

Mr. Jekielek:
You describe all these different smoking guns, but the DEFUSE proposal is the big one, because it is the blueprint for creating such a virus. What should come from the work of the select committee on the coronavirus?

Senator Marshall:
We’ve got to stop making it so personal with Dr. Fauci and focus on what we need to do to correct the system. That’s what is missing right now. Look, when this virus broke out, we had a plan for a pandemic, ASPR [Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response]. The assistant HHS secretary, Dr. Robert Kadlec, should have been leading the charge on this, along with Dr. Robert Redfield, maybe the wisest man I have met in decades. Those two got pushed to the side.

Instead of asking advice from scientists within the government, Fauci reached out to his gain-of-function mafia. He should have been reaching out to organizations within the government. One is MBIC, the bioscience intelligence community within the government. The other one is the NCMI, the medical intelligence within the government. He should have been reaching out to the FBI as well. I, myself, would have reached out to all of them.

During the hearing today, someone asked him who he should have reached out to. The State Department had incredible incriminating evidence, even before January 1, 2020, on what was going on in China. All these suspicious happenings were going on in Wuhan. During the 2019 Military World Games, the city becomes vacant. There were a whole bunch of coincidental pieces of the puzzle.

But instead, Fauci centralizes it, and he consults with his viral gain-of-function mafia, the people that were going to get $2 billion of grants over a two-year time frame. Their institution has got $2 billion worth of grants from Anthony Fauci, NIH, and the federal government as well. Why did he reach out to those people rather than the proper channels?

Mr. Jekielek:
He actually responded to that in the testimony today. He said he wanted to ask them to convene a group of evolutionary biologists to assess the veracity and the significance of this furin cleavage site.

Senator Marshall:
This is the meeting on February 1, 2020. Before that, who were the people? Two of the premier virologists in the world studying this, Kristian Andersen and Eddie Holmes, came to Dr. Fauci and said, “We think that this came from the laboratory. This is right before the February 1 meeting. Fauci says, “Okay, and let’s convene this meeting.”

In a matter of days, he flips the whole script. Just a week after that meeting, Fauci was on Newt Gingrich’s podcast. Who did he have with him? Peter Daszak, of all people. They were saying, “There’s no way that this could have come from a laboratory.” Again, there is this whole trail of crumbs. Why is Fauci so motivated to hide this? Why doesn’t he even look at the possibility that this could have come from a laboratory?

Mr. Jekielek:
In your op-ed you mentioned the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which is relevant to the meeting that you just described. This is something you want specifically used in discussions with Fauci or elsewhere. Please explain that for us.

Senator Marshall:
The Federal Advisory Act says if someone in the government is seeking counsel, they need to do it very transparently. They have to be people that aren’t prejudiced and don’t have a conflict of interest. This is exactly the opposite of what Dr. Fauci did. Instead of going to the government agencies; the State Department, the DOD, and the intelligence community, he went to these people that are beholden to him, people that he literally was giving billions of dollars in grants. He didn’t follow the legal process.

If I learned one thing as a physician, you need to have a plan and use it the same way every time. They just dodged the plan completely for some reason. Our planned response to a pandemic was dodged.

Mr. Jekielek:
In today’s testimony, there was a bipartisan interest in holding Dr. Morens and Dr. Daszak accountable. Aside from accountability, we have to make sure that this type of situation doesn’t happen again. How do we do that?

Senator Marshall:
My reflection on the hearing today is that we took two steps back. This turned into more of a partisan hearing, where the Democrats are basically applauding Lord Fauci, and the Republicans trying to find somebody accountable. At the last hearing it was more agreed upon that David Morens is the culprit here, and Peter Daszak and EcoHealth are the culprits here. There has been a very concerted effort by the insiders and NIH to throw those two under the bus. I absolutely think that is what’s going on here.

It is so hard to walk away from the politics of this. I don’t understand it and I get so frustrated. This is about the health of millions of people. A million Americans have died. We have 10 to 15,000 Americans with long Covid that are incapacitated right now and we still don’t have all the truth.

You know, if an airplane crashes, we go to great lengths to find out why. We need a 9-11-style, deep, full-throated forensic investigation. Take the investigation out of D.C. and get the politics out of it. Take it to Kansas. Take it somewhere else and do a full-throated forensic investigation to learn from our mistakes.

We’re throwing around ideas for different types of legislation. Legislation number one is that NIAID needs its own inspector general. They currently don’t have an inspector general. Next, for the grant process, they need to bring in national security. We should put term limits on people like Dr. Fauci and people in high positions, whether it’s in the FBI, the CDC, or the NIAID. They just accumulate too much power.

They didn’t even admit to the problems with this six-foot social distancing.
I called the CDC on that lie when they first recommended that. I said, “Show me the studies.” They sent me almost 100 studies and I went through every one of them. The only study even close to having anything to do with this was a 1930s article on tuberculosis that talked about how far the tuberculin bacteria would spew when you coughed. Comparing that to this Covid virus is like comparing not an apple to an orange, but an apple to a watermelon, because that tuberculin particle is so big.

The mask mandate was the same thing. They sent me over 100 articles on the mask mandate, and 80 of them said the mask didn’t matter. 10 percent said it made it worse, which I believed. Then 10 percent said maybe it helps, but the papers weren’t peer reviewed. There was no science to them.

I get pretty frustrated when a physician presents something to me as dogma when it’s actually theory. There was a lack of humbleness and no one said, “I need consultations, I need help.” The solution that’s going to work in New York City may be different than what’s going to work in my home of Great Bend, Kansas.

Mr. Jekielek:
You mentioned that conflict of interest needs to be dealt with. One of the recent revelations is that 700 million dollars of royalties went to NIH scientists. This is from Adam Andrzejewski over at OpenTheBooks.com. Dr. Fauci was asked about this. He said that he had received none of that money. What do you think about this idea of royalties? By the way, these royalties were just from the Covid era.

Senator Marshall:
First of all, we discussed this for months at my office and there is a solution. These research scientists need to list their royalties. I’m not sure where or how. I have to report every investment I make as a senator. It should be the same for these folks that work for the federal government if they get royalties. It is that simple. We need a law that says that and I don’t want any wiggle room.

We’re getting the lawyers involved now to take these concepts and then put them into some type of writing. We need inspector generals at the USAID. We need public transparency for royalties. You just can’t shine enough light on this, evidently.

Mr. Jekielek:
Talking about shining light, what about the FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] process?

Senator Marshall:
How do we put teeth into it? From day one, Congress has asked for information. We even passed a law that Biden signed asking to declassify lots of this information and they still haven’t gotten it to us. This is the swamp here in D.C. There are federal officials and bureaucrats like Fauci that have more power and control than a United States senator does. I go back to the term limits issue. This goes way beyond just writing laws. There needs to be some house cleaning here. But I couldn’t be more frustrated.

Mr. Jekielek:
You’re saying it has to be more than just passing laws and there has to be some house cleaning. What does that look like?

Senator Marshall:
It looks like a Donald Trump kicking ass and taking names and putting an end to this. Term limits at a certain level in the federal government will help. But it’s going to take some very brave congressmen and senators to stand up to these people and start clipping their budgets.

We have people here concerned about the size of the Chinese Navy.
I have more concern about their cyber attacks and their biosecurity attacks, the things you can’t see, rather than the size of their Navy, which is very real, nonetheless. That’s why we have a BSL-4 laboratory at Kansas State University, in order to be prepared for those biosecurity attacks. This is all quite a challenge.

We’re seeing the highly contagious avian flu going across the country right now. We found it in dairies in Kansas. There’s two or three humans now that have it as well. Where did that virus come from? Why is it suddenly acting meaner? I’m very suspicious. But it does take a scientific response at some level to battle it.

Mr. Jekielek:
The blueprints for making avian flu more transmissible to humans were published back in 2012. That was the reason for the gain-of-function moratorium with caveats. We need to know that people are publishing things like this. Let’s talk about the national security side. Collaborations with communist China on gain-of-function research would be one example. You’ve made your case very clear on that. But what about biotechnology and other types of technology that have military potential?

Senator Marshall:
I’m absolutely done with this. I came to Congress with an open mind. Think about what China does here. They steal $500 billion worth of intellectual property from us every year. They don’t respect our intellectual property. If you discover oil in your backyard, they think it belongs to them. It’s an adversarial philosophy, so I don’t trust them a bit.

Mr. Jekielek:
Secretary of State Pompeo had this maxim; distrust and verify. It’s a play on, trust but verify, from Ronald Reagan back in the day. But if you see the same pattern again and again, you have to assume it will happen again. Is that what you’re getting at?

Senator Marshall:
You got it. You don’t do business with someone that was dishonest with you. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Look at the bigger picture here. 90 percent of the counterfeits that come into this country are made in China. 90 percent of the fentanyl precursors coming into this country are made in CCP labs. We mentioned intellectual property theft and cyber attacks.

I sit in these financial institutions and see the cyber attacks coming over at the rate of a dozen per second. They’re all coming from two or three countries; Russia, China, and typically North Korea. What else do we need to see here? Why would we cooperate with them?

Mr. Jekielek:
You mentioned term limits for government bureaucrats. What about for congressional members?

Senator Marshall:
I’m all for it. It’s one of the first things I signed up for. But it wouldn’t be fair for Kansas to have term limits and not the other states, that’s my caveat.
But if there was ever an opportunity to vote for that, I would be all for it.

Mr. Jekielek:
Any final thoughts as we finish up?

Senator Marshall:
Until someone can convince me that it’s safe, America needs to stop funding gain-of-function research, which is much more dangerous than nuclear bombs are at this point in time.
We should stop funding it with our adversaries. We shouldn’t be giving them any more of our technology.

If they’re going to continue their research, we have to prevent them from getting ahead of us. I acknowledge that. It’s going to take some very thoughtful people to put the proper guardrails around how we’re going to do that research. But we cannot be doing this research with our adversaries.

Mr. Jekielek:
Senator Roger Marshall, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Senator Marshall:
I enjoyed it, Jan. Thank you.

Mr. Jekielek:
Thank you all for joining Senator Roger Marshall and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.